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Review: Tove Lo – Cool Girl

Tove Lo is yet another example of a Swedish talent delivering the absolute best of Pop music. Over and over again. After taking the stage with a major global hit in “Habits (Stay High)”, the 28 year old singer and songwriter followed up with arguably one of the best Albums of 2014 – Queen Of The Clouds. Habits itself was quite the sleeper hit, slowly making its way to the top of the charts. Queen Of The Clouds spawned another hit single with “Talking Body”. Before starting her own music career as a recording artist, Tove Lo has written for multiple artists including Lea Michele (“Thousand Needles”), Hilary Duff (“Sparks”) and most notably Tove co-wrote Ellie Goulding’s “Love Me Like You Do” from the Fifty Shades Of Grey soundtrack.

Since the release of Queen Of The Clouds, Tove has been featured on many songs and released songs for soundtracks (for example “Scars” as part of the Divergent Series). “Cool Girl” marks the new official lead single for her yet untitled second album. At the 2016 Billboard Music Awards earlier this year, Tove described her new sound as “dark-techno blended with Pop” and “dreamier” (watch the interview here ).

“Cool Girl” definitely follows the “dark-techno” sound Tove has described. Following a sound that reminds a bit of The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face”, “Cool Girl” still has Tove Lo written all over it. Not surprisingly, the song was produced by The Struts – The production team behind most of Queen Of The Clouds, most notably “Habits”, “Talking Body” but also several album tracks like “Love Ballad” and “Like ‘Em Young”. Certainly The Struts contributed a lot to “Cool Girl” still fitting perfectly to Tove Lo’s musical identity.

You can run free, I won’t hold it against ya. You do your thing, never wanted a future. Fuck if I knew how to put it romantic. Speaking my truth, there’s no need to panic

The strongest features of “Cool Girl” are probably the infectious beat in the chorus and its simple, yet effective lyrics. The “Cool Girl” thematic is actually quite present in both lyrics and music. Though it could be described as “dark-techno”, Cool Girl isn’t your usual techno banger. The beat is actually fairly slow and chill (or “cool” hehe) but still follows a very structured and consistent tempo. Unfortunately this makes the song a bit flat in a sense that it doesn’t really evolve or change in tempo throughout the song. Not that it absolutely needs to – but a little change-up to break the pattern could’ve been a nice way to elevate the song to even higher grounds.

However, the apparent simplicity (though the song is anything but simple in terms of production) makes the song really easy to grasp and makes it quite the earworm. The fact that the lyrics, especially during the chorus, are fairly simple also contribute to that point. All of this makes “Cool Girl” a very solid follow up to the likes of “Habits” and “Talking Body” and certainly makes everyone a little more curious about Tove’s next album.